<nettime> Smells Like Columbine , More Than Al-Qaeda

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@balkansnet.org>]

Check out the top story in The Salt Lake Tribune today
http://origin.sltrib.com/ci_5230906

     >>He fled a war with his family as a child and came to Utah as a 
     refugee. He floated from school to school before dropping out. A 
     Muslim, he sometimes attended a Salt Lake City mosque for Friday 
     prayers before landing a full-time job to help support his parents 
     and three sisters. Although he was a loner and withdrawn, Sulejman 
     Talovic seemed normal and "nice" to the few people who knew him.<<

Until on Monday after work he drove to the Trolley Square mall, 
strapped on a bandoleer of shotgun shells and a backpack full of 
handgun ammunition and killed five people before being shot dead by 
police officers. 

What does Utah do to people!? I believe that the story of young 
Bosnian refugee shooting people at the shopping mall in Salt Lake 
City on Monday has more roots in Columbine-like disconnection, than 
in the Muslim fundamentalism or political terrorism. I think, 
therefore, that we should pay more attention to the experiences young 
Sulejman Talovic had during his past nine years of life as a teenage 
refugee in Utah, then to the traumas he experienced in his war-torn 
old homeland of Bosnia, to understand the roots of this tragic event. 

Urgently, there is a need on part of the media to call against 
possible backlash against Bosnian immigrants in Utah, feared because 
of this crime, and, maybe, for the call for introspection and some 
soul searching in Utah. Also, how about Congress start really taking 
more seriously the availability of heavy firearms to everybody in the 
U.S.? Here we have a guy who is not a citizen, not even legal to 
drink beer, barely out of school, yet he can arm himself like some 
kind of Rambo - is THIS freedom?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/us/15mall.html

Muslim Forum of Utah, in order to distance itself from the tragedy, 
goes as far as to say that they are happy that police shot Sulejman, 
a hermit and a fornicator, who, "some say" was really of a gypsy 
background...
http://www.muslim-forum.org/


ivo


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